Ericsson Defends T-Mobile’s ATSC 3.0 White Paper, but AWARN Alliance Blasts It
Days after Sinclair struck back against a T-Mobile “technical white paper” filed at the FCC that accused the broadcaster of oversimplifying the complexities of building ATSC 3.0 reception into smartphones (see 1709130050), Ericsson came to T-Mobile’s defense. Ericsson offered “additional comments” why it thinks those complexities would make a 3.0 mandate in smartphones a bad idea, even though the commission hasn’t proposed one and few commenters in the 3.0 proceeding have. The T-Mobile paper also drew the wrath of the AWARN Alliance, which accused the carrier of flip-flopping when it called 3.0-based emergency alerting “inferior” to that of the wireless industry's wireless emergency alerts (WEA) platform.
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“As T-Mobile notes, adding ATSC 3.0 reception capability to mobile handsets is a complex task,” Ericsson said in an ex parte letter posted Friday in docket 16-142. “It is not nearly as simple as just adding a new chip to a mobile device. It will affect the cost and size of mobile devices and due to the technological trade-offs involved will reduce the performance of the mobile device.” Ericsson said it hopes the FCC continues on its course of pursuing the “voluntary adoption” of 3.0, but it should “seek more analysis for the record if it determines to reverse this policy in favor of a regulatory mandate dictating the functionalities of mobile handsets.”
In addition to the challenges of fitting a smartphone with an unwieldy external antenna to receive 3.0 broadcasts, as the T-Mobile paper described, “the television broadcast network is typically planned with site-to-site distances that rely on outdoor roof-mounted directional antennas,” Ericsson said. “Those antennas provide a 20-30 dB signal gain when compared to the gain of a mobile handset located in an indoor environment. As a practical matter, that comparable gain cannot be overcome even with an exceptional antenna in the mobile device, greatly limiting the utility that an ATSC 3.0 mandate would presumably seek to achieve.”
As for the AWARN Alliance's objections to the T-Mobile paper, it thinks as “an initial matter” that T-Mobile’s document is “irrelevant” to the proceeding because it discusses “purported challenges around a fictional mandate,” it said in an ex parte letter also posted Friday. T-Mobile’s statements that 3.0-based emergency alerting would be an “inferior platform” compared with that of “the well-established wireless network” were in “stark contrast” to replies the carrier filed in January in the "alerting paradigm" NPRM in which it argued WEA isn't appropriate for many emergency situations, such as earthquake early-warning alerts, or won't support multimedia imaging, the alliance said.
T-Mobile's January filing “claims limitations in its network to prevent or delay adoption of features benchmarked by the Commission for alerting,” the alliance said. But in its 3.0 paper, “it concludes peremptorily that ‘ATSC 3.0 therefore will be an inferior platform for emergency purposes compared to current wireless alerting technology,’” the alliance said. “ATSC 3.0 provides the building blocks to make the improvements to public alerting that T-Mobile says are not possible, realistic, or needed on its network.” The wireless provider didn't comment.
The carrier “also claims superior coverage of its wireless network in comparison to broadcast coverage” for emergency alerts, the alliance said. “Recent painful events illustrate -- again -- the vital importance of broadcasting in public emergencies,” it said, citing the FCC’s Monday communications status report that found 80 percent of cell towers were out of service in areas of the Florida Keys hardest hit by Hurricane Irma, compared with only four TV stations that were down in all the state. “Irma demonstrates once again that broadcasting will continue its role as ‘first informer’ during public emergencies, as it has for decades,” the alliance said.